I just love the really good niche blogs I come across once in a while. I frequently find myself defending the virtues of blogs to editors and fellow journos and find it perhaps too easy to refer to those blogs with high and mighty ambitions about changing the world, setting the agenda etc.

But if we start talking about blogs that really make a difference we shouldn't forget the more light hearted stuff, covering lifestyle issues with so much zest, passion and indepth know-how that they surely deserve to be called crogs. I've found some wonderful blogs doing exactly that and have been particularly impressed by a few blogs about drinking.

So far, my favourites are Natalie's The Liquid Muse, Knut Albert's beer blog and the now defunct DC drinks. I've also been looking for a good blog about wine, here's a good contender I just stumbled across, but also found this blog with a long blogroll worth exploring.

I'm not much of a cocktail drinker myself, but I marvel at how my friend Natalie has managed to turn her blog into a one-woman cocktail company with a cocktail book coming out soon, penning various columns on libations and whipping out signature cocktails for a number of high-profile parties, including the Celebrity Poker Tournament at The Playboy Mansion:

And here's Knut Albert on the importance of beer:

It's all thanks to beer
Because before beer was discovered, people used to wander around and follow goats from place to place. And then they realized that this grain [barley] could be grown and sprouted and made into a bread and crumbled and converted into a liquid whiceh gave a nice, warm, cozy feeling. So gone were the days that they followed goats around. They stayed put while the grain grew and while the beer was brewed. And they made villages out of their tents. And those villages became towns, and those towns became cities. And so here we are in New York, thanks to beer.